Friday, December 9, 2011

Woman fakes her own brutal rape to convince her husband to move to a better neighborhood

According to the Sacramento Bee, Laurie Ann Martinez, 36, a licensed psychologist who oversees a team of clinicians who treat inmates with mental health issues in a California prison, wanted to persuade her husband to move to another neighborhood. How do you suppose she did it? She did what any sane and rational woman would do: she convinced a female friend to help her stage a brutal rape.The paper reports that Martinez instructed her friend to purchase boxing gloves to rough up her face. Then she scuffed up her own hands with sandpaper, used a pin to cut her lip, ripped open her shirt to expose her breasts, and urinated on herself to make it look as if she had been knocked out. Then she called police.

When the police arrived, Martinez was lying on the floor, crying hysterically. She told officers she had come home to find a strange man who knocked her unconscious, raped her, and robbed her. She said the men got away with her wedding ring, two laptop computers, a purse, and an Xbox. In reality, Martinez had hidden the supposedly missing items in her home (except for the ring, which, apparently, remains missing). She went with police to the hospital for an evidentiary exam.

Two of Martinez's co-workers interviewed separately by police said Martinez had made comments that she couldn't get her husband to move to a "safer, more desirable neighborhood," so she was thinking of staging a crime at the house, the detective wrote. One co-worker said she blew the whistle on Martinez because she was disturbed by how "calculated" the conspiracy was. Psychologists adhere to a professional code of ethics and are held to a higher behavioral standard, she said. "The fact that someone who has been entrusted with care of other people … behaves in this manner – I don't think she should be able (to practice psychology)," she said. "I think the state has an obligation to protect the public from that."

Both Martinez and her female accomplice admitted the scheme to police. Martinez also admitted the motive.

Martinez's husband is divorcing her.

Add it to the list. On this blog, we've previously reported on women who've made false rape claims for the following reasons: the accuser’s boyfriend took too long to buy cigarettes; a man refused to give his false accuser a beer; a maid falsely accused her employer of rape because she didn’t like her workload; a girl falsely accused a man of rape for throwing a flower at her; a woman caused three men to be interrogated for rapes they didn’t commit because she wanted a day off from work; several women didn’t want to pay cab fares, so they accused innocent cab drivers of rape; a girl wanted to get back at her teen ex-boyfriend — her rape lie not only got him convicted, but two of his friends as well; a woman wanted to get back at her ex-boyfriend for breaking it off, so she falsely accused him of rape and candidly admitted: “I just wanted him to be hurt because of what he’d done”; a young woman said she wanted her young ex-boyfriend “to feel extreme pain”; a woman sent a man to prison for five years because she said she was bored; a woman was bent on revenge after a road rage incident; and an 18-year-year-old young man was hauled out of class, arrested, and jailed for a month on a random false rape claim by a girl he had never even met. And I could go on and on, but you get the point.

Footnote: The reporter who wrote the story about Martinez for the Sacramento Bee, whose name is Kim Minugh, quotes someone named Beth Hassett, who is identified as the executive director of Women Escaping a Violent Environment. Hasset, according to the news report, "said false reports of sexual assault are extremely rare: She cited a U.S. Department of Justice statistic that only 2.5 percent of reports turn out to be false." I am, of course, aware of no such study. It is widely accepted that the number is higher than that. Moreover, the suggestion from the article is that some study definitively ruled that 97.5% of all rape claims are actual rapes -- and that is laughable because no study could truthfully say that. The most any study could truthfully say is that a certain percentage of claims are actual rapes; a certain percentage are false rape claims; but the vast majority fall in a middle gray area where we just don't know the answer. Kim Minugh, and her editor, ought to know better than to print something they don't bother to substantiate.